The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  In brief, if you’re not there to help the regime’s image abroad, you’re not getting a visa, at least more than once. And if in the Stalinist regime’s estimation you helped their image insufficiently, a little “prodding” might be applied, via blackmail. Upon publishing his book, for instance, Spanish reporter Vicente Botin promptly lost his Cuban visa. The Discovery Channel, on the other hand, seems to have a perpetual red carpet into Castro’s fiefdom.

  “Discovery Channel Returns From Underwater Scientific Expedition Off the Coast of Cuba,” read the Science Daily headline in January 1998. “Crew of scientists received a surprise visit from Cuban President Fidel Castro.... Castro has long been interested in underwater expedition and he spent two hours on the boat talking with the scientists about their findings and about the issues of underwater conservation.” The Castro regime touts scuba diving as among Cuba’s top tourist attractions, in case the Discovery Channel hadn’t guessed.

  The Discovery Channel has also featured sport-fishing videos filmed in full partnership with the Stalinist regime’s ministry of tourism. The obvious purpose is to attract a large number of well-heeled sport fishermen from around the world to Cuba’s unspoiled and fish-filled coastal waters.

  By the simple expedient of banning boat-ownership under penalty of prison or firing squad for everyone except high-ranking government officials, many other nations could boast fishing grounds every bit as unspoiled as those surrounding the Castro brothers’ fiefdom. On June 20, 2012, for instance, the Stalinist regime held a huge and public bonfire; not of illegal books like Animal Farm—as in the bonfire of 2005 that prompted Ray Bradbury to denounce the Castro regime’s book-burning—but of illegal floating devices. These floating devices (mostly one-man contraptions fashioned from styrofoam and wood) belonged to what the regime deplores as “illegal fishermen,” Cubans who paddle out at night in desperate hope of supplementing their slave-era government rations with some of the delicious fish that swarm off Cuba’s coast.

  These Cubans’ paddling and fishing is often hampered by huge wakes thrown by magnificent yachts captained by fat foreign millionaires who roar past them in quest of marlin and wahoo for the walls of their trophy-rooms. But the foreign magnates usually roar by with a friendly wave, perhaps even lifting their mojitos in salutation. Given their docking fees and other expenses at the regime-run Hemingway Marina, the “nationalist” regime which hosts and pampers them would never think to admonish any discourtesy they might show to the gnarled, dusky, hungry natives in their path.

  Castro’s nationalist regime burned the pathetic little Cuban craft almost within sight of the hundreds of foreign millionaire-owned yachts tethered at Hemingway Marina just east of Havana.

  Such a surefire tourism-booster (outlawing fishing by their own countrymen) never seems to have occurred to any of those dreaded right-wing dictators, so vilified in the media. Under Batista, for instance, boat ownership for coastal Cubans was regarded as almost a birthright. During the 50’s foreign fishermen clamored for a chance to fish with Cubans aboard their often spacious and luxurious boats. If you’re ever in Miami, ask around.

  As a five-, six- and seven-year-old I well remember the weekend ritual of fishing with my grandfather. He’d rent a boat much like the one in The Old Man and the Sea and not far from where Hemingway’s old man set off every morning. He’d row us out a few hundred yards to hand-line for ronquito (yellow grunt), rabi-rubia (yellowtail snapper) and cabrilla (grouper).

  I also remember the morning the grimacing fisherman told us the trip was off. He motioned us over to his boat which was overturned in the sand and riddled with bullet-holes. Too many people were going fishing and winding up in Key West, Castro’s guards had explained to him as they reloaded their Czech machine-guns with fresh clips.

  In brief, Discovery Channel personnel have no trouble obtaining Cuban visas, which in turn drop much tourist currency in regime coffers. Would this continue if their ultra-popular programs “Teeth of Death” or “Blood in the Water” featured the death and blood of men, women and children driven to near-suicidal desperation by the Stalinist regime with which they partner for videos and infomercials of mutual benefit? Would the gracious host and president, who paid the Discovery Channel producers a surprise visit, be cool with those types of shows? The question answers itself.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Discovery Channel Spins the Missile Crisis

  To its partnership with Castro’s ministry of tourism, in October 2008 the Discovery Channel added Castro’s ministry of history. The program was entitled “Defcon-2” and covered the Cuban Missile Crisis. “DEFCON-2, the official term for the highest level of U.S. military readiness short of nuclear war, goes back to the tension-filled days of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” reads the trailer. “Author Tom Clancy hosts an analysis of key participants on both sides of the confrontation.”

  The tension-filled program, complete with a Jaws-type soundtrack, features interviews with some of Cuba’s highest-ranking apparatchiks, though not Fidel or Raul. Conspicuously absent (for those who know the matter) was the most tension-filled incident of all. Think of what the Discovery Channel’s crackerjack writers and producers could have produced using the following incident starring Soviet Premier Khrushchev, as witnessed and later described by Sergei Khrushchev, the premier’s son:

  “‘Nikita Sergeyevich, a very disturbing message has also come in from Castro.’ Oleg Aleksandrovich [Troyanovsky, the premier’s assistant] again spoke in quiet and measured tones. ‘The text itself is still at the Foreign Ministry, but I have written down its main points.’

  “‘Yes?’ asked Father impatiently.

  “‘Castro thinks that war will begin in the next few hours and that his source is reliable. In the opinion of the Cuban leadership, the people are ready to repel imperialist aggression and would rather die than surrender. We should be the first to deliver a nuclear strike.

  “‘WHAT?!’

  “‘That is what I was told,’ Troyanovsky responded, without visible disquiet.

  “‘What?’ said Father somewhat more calmly. ”‘Is he proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?’

  “‘Apparently.’

  “‘That is insane!’ Whatever doubts Father might have had about his decision to remove the missiles had vanished completely. ‘Remove them, and as soon as possible. Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens.’

  “The meeting’s participants stared at one another incredulously. To start a world war so cavalierly! Obviously events were slipping out of control. Yesterday the Cubans had shot down a plane without permission. Today they were preparing a nuclear attack.

  “To general approval, Father ordered that an immediate order be sent to Pliyev through military channels: ‘Allow no one [Castro or his people] near the missiles. Obey no orders [from Castro or his people] to launch and under no circumstances install the warheads.’”1

  So much for JFK cowing Khrushchev with his bluster and naval blockade. Khrushchev was cowed all right, but by the genocidal lust of his errant Caribbean satrap (and Discovery Channel business partner), not by the commander-in-chief of a nation with a nuclear warhead superiority over his own by a margin of 5,000 to 300.

  Khrushchev snickered the truth in his memoirs: “It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba—for a country 6,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable.” So much for the threat that rattled the Knights of Camelot and inspired such epics of drama and derring-do by their court scribes and court cinematographers (i.e., the mainstream media and Hollywood).

  Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the so-called Missile Crisis—5,000 nuclear warheads for us, 300 for them—it’s hard to imagine President Nixon, much less President Reagan, quaking in front of Khrushchev’s transparent ruse as Kennedy did. The genuine threat came not from Moscow but from the Discovery Channel’s production partner, Fidel Castro.

  So naturally there is n
o mention in the Discovery Channel’s “Defcon-2” of how Che Guevara—thinking he was off-the-record a month later—fully confirmed Khrushchev’s fears (and prudence). ”If the missiles had remained, we would have used them all and fired them against the heart of the United States, including New York.“2

  “What we contend is that we must walk the path of liberation,” wrote Che in Castro’s house organ Verde Olivo a week later, “even if it may cost millions of atomic victims .... What we must consider is the ultimate the victory of socialism.”

  Khrushchev’s response to Castro was low-key and diplomatic: “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. You, of course, realize where that would have led. It would have been the start of a thermonuclear war. Dear comrade Fidel Castro I consider this proposal of yours incorrect.”3

  Did Stanley Kubrick realize he had directed a documentary entitled Dr. Strangelove rather than a fiction? He simply got a few scenes wrong. The real-life General Ripper and Major T. J. Kong were both in Havana, not at Burleson Air Force Base or Washington, D.C.

  The Discovery Channel somehow “omitted” the most dramatic scene from the entire crisis, just as they omit the daily sanguinary drama of the half-century-long “Shark Week” in the Florida Straits. There was no hint in the Discovery Channel special of Fidel Castro’s raging lust to fire the missiles preemptively against the nation in which the Discovery Channel dwells.

  Castro’s image as the plucky David surviving decades of bullying and brutalization by the Yankee Goliath also emerged intact from the Discovery Channel program. There was no mention whatever of Khrushchev’s snickering with satisfaction about the Missile Crisis resolution. “We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along,” he wrote in his memoir. “Security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro.”

  So far from defying a superpower, Fidel Castro has poked along lo these many years by hiding behind the skirts of the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and the British Empire. After the Missile Crisis resolution, Castro’s defiance of the U.S. took the form of protection by the U.S. Coast Guard and also by the British Navy, shielding Castro from attacks by his Cuban-exile enemies in the U.S. and the Bahamas.

  So sacrosanct was the U.S. pledge to protect Castro that it even stayed Ronald Reagan’s hand. When Professor Antonio De La Cova asked Elliott Abrams, assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs under Regan, about the possibility of arming some Cuban contras in the manner of Nicaragua’s, Abrams replied: “You can’t do that because of the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement. We never got there, at least not in the period that I was involved with it. We never got to contemplating any serious action in Cuba which could be considered a violation of the agreement.”4

  Castro, on the other hand, was again itching to get his fingers on the button. A Pentagon study declassified in 2009, entitled “Soviet Intentions 1965-1985,” based on extensive interviews with former Soviet officials, shows that Castro’s urge to toast Manhattan flared again during the Reagan administration.

  During the early 1890’s—according to a former chief of the Soviet general staff, General Adrian Danilevich—“Mr. Castro pressed hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and including nuclear strikes. We had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S.”

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PARTNERS WITH CASTRO

  National Geographic’s partnership with Castro’s propaganda ministry started with a January 1977 article—really an infomercial for Castroism—called “Inside Cuba Today.” The article featured an interview with Fidel Castro and proclaimed that “over half of Cubans’ lives had been improved by the Revolution.” The magazine’s pro-Castro coverage continued in 1991 with “Cuba at a Crossroads” by Peter White, and then in 2000 with “Cuba’s Reefs, A Last Caribbean Refuge” by none other than Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws.

  “Cuba Naturally,” a National Geographic feature presenting Cuba as a paradise of ecosystems, followed in 2003. Then in 2006 came “Castro the Conservationst? By Default or Design, Cuba Largely Pristine.” Here we learn that “Cuba’s land-tenure system [identical to Stalin’s for the Ukraine] and relatively strong enforcement of laws [!] are all associated with its conservation achievements.”

  In March 2012 National Geographic finally dropped any pretense of objectivity and ran an unabashed tourist infomercial entitled “Falling for Cuba.” The commercial was timed to kick off the joint National Geographic-Castro-regime tours called “Cuba; Discovering Its People and Cuba.” In this joint venture, the magazine and the regime helpfully provide full-time tour-guides. Among these is The Washington Post’s Tom Miller, whose services to the regime began with his book Trading With the Enemy; A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba, published in 1996, just as the regime’s tourism campaign was kicking into high gear. The Cuban red carpet—a visa for the asking—has been extended to Miller ever since.

  A Canadian company runs similar junkets called “Cuba Discovery Tours.” Some highlights from their brochure:

  “Your tour is fully escorted by Cuban experts from the minute you touch down in Havana until you return home! You’ll experience island history, social and ecological achievements first-hand from Cubans.”

  Among the testimonials from enchanted customers:

  “So many museums and not enough time to see them all! My favorite visit was to the Fortress of San Carlos de la Cabana. We saw where Che Guevara set up his headquarters!” (Headquarters for what? No further details provided.)

  “Above all, this tour was truly an education. If you go, your eyes and hearts will be opened, and you’ll come home with different outlooks on many issues.”

  “In addition to expressing great pride in the country’s low crime rate, the Cubans that we met took great pride in their successful literacy campaign, and their high investment and emphasis on education and health-care. Cuba was declared the first Illiteracy-Free Country in the Americas after its revolutionary victory!”

  “The elevated status of women and health-care for women and children were also areas that Cubans spoke of with pride.”

  “Our guide, Reynaldo, an enthusiastic and ebullient man in his forties, was with us throughout the stay in Cuba!”

  We know.

  CHAPTER 6

  Castro’s Running-Dogs: Herbert Matthews and The New York Times

  The New York Times’s Herbert Matthews, who repeatedly denounced Batista as “tyrant, torturer, murderer, thief,” etc., visited Cuba repeatedly during Batista’s reign. (Try that during Castro’s.) The interview and three-part fron page feature that resulted from his first trip in February 1957 “invented” Fidel Castro, according to fellow Times reporter Anthony DePalma. In 2006 DePalma authored a book about Herbert Matthews entitled, appropriately enough, The Man Who Invented Fidel.

  In his book, DePalma endeavors to offer a mea culpa of sorts on the Matthews-Castro saga but in a highly sympathetic manner, as befits their New York Times fellowship. DePalma starts with a nail-biting account of the perils Herbert Matthews faced while clandestinely setting up the interviews, then clandestinely making his perilous way to those ground-breaking interviews.

  “He [Matthews] did not see anyone from the Batista Government because he feared that doing so might raise suspicion about his presence in Cuba,” DePalma states in his book. “Matthews had decided that that the best way of getting past the cordon of troops surrounding the Sierra [Maestra, mountains of eastern Cuba] was to bring along [his wife] Nancie and pretend to be a couple of middle-aged American tourists out with some young Cuban friends.”

  “Matthews confided to her that many young Cubans were risking their lives to smuggle him into the mountains, so it was important to be discreet during the long trip.” Crowded into the car,
they passed the hours on the rough road singing Cuban songs or talking about the revolutionary movement for which they were risking their lives. Matthews was enthralled by his secret passage through Cuba.

  “A soldier stepped into the road in front of them! It was the first real test of their plan. He peered inside the car, checking out the young Cubans in the front and the American couple in the back. They all held their breath for a second, their hearts racing.... He took a quick look around the car and smiled, then waved them through.”

  Finally they reached the Sierra Maestra, got out of the car and started hiking. “The only sounds were the night-voices of the forest—the screeches of animals and the heavy drip, drip, drip of raindrops ... finally out of the darkness came an unmistakable sound—the two flat notes of the secret code... the scout whispered that [Castro’s] camp was nearby ... It was just after dawn and Matthews was muddy, hungry, cold ... but this was why he had come all the way from New York.... Castro strode into the clearing with the sun just breaking through the clouds and dawn seeping into the day.”I

  The New York Times’ prize-winning investigative reporter Anthony DePalma wrote his book in 2006, almost exactly a half-century after The New York Times’ prize-winning investigative reporter Herbert Matthews wrote his famous Castro articles. Which means—not to take anything away from DePalma’s heart-pounding prose—that, for 48 years, sworn testimony on the public record which makes a hilarious hash of his account was available to anyone willing to devote about 60 seconds to investigating the issue.

  In fact, Matthews’s trip to the Sierra for the Castro interview was not only approved by Batista—who thought Castro was dead at the time so it would do no harm—but provided a police escort by Batista to insure Matthews’s safety every step of the way. To wit, from hearings of the Judiciary Committee in the U.S. Senate, August 1960: